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Category Archives: the arXiv

A while ago we discussed the idea of “oldmathpapers.org”, a public repository for maths papers that aren’t readily available online. Many people quickly pointed out that this was a dangerous idea, getting very quickly into the deep waters of copyright violation.

Nevertheless, here’s version 0, ready for your consumption! It neatly sidesteps the whole copyright issue by not keeping copies (or even looking at) actual versions of the paper — it’s simply intended to keep track of links to old maths papers, hosted elsewhere. That elsewhere, of course, is meant to be your and my web pages!

Functionality is extremely limited; you can add a paper, you can list everything there so far, but there’s no searching, no sorting, no deleting, no correcting. On the other hand, I think that won’t be too too hard to add. The most important thing to note about the design of “oldmathpapers.org” is that it relies on MathSciNet identifiers to keep track of things. These exist for pretty much every published maths paper, and they’re a ready source of high quality metadata — and it’s this that will hopefully make the searching and sorting easy.

Below, I’ll walk you through adding a paper: “Canonical bases in tensor products and graphical calculus for U_q(sl_2)”, by I. Frenkel and M. Khovanov. After that, please take a moment to contribute some old math papers!

Has anyone else tried Zotero yet? It’s a Firefox add-on intended to help you organize the papers you use in your research (organize notes, make bibliographies [it seems to have bibtex support], etc.). It still seems to have some kinks that need working out (for example, it seems to work better with the arXiv’s website than the Front’s), but it does look promising. And if it actually allows me to keep track of which arxiv articles I have downloaded on my computer, it will be invaluable for that alone (at the moment, it’s much easier for me to download the PDF from the web again rather than locate it in my downloads folder, a ridiculous state of affairs).

The problem is that lots of old math papers aren’t online, and that we cumulatively spend too much time tracking them down, and making our own individual copies of these. Happily, many people now scan them, producing PDFs, once they’ve finally got their hands on a copy. The solution to the problem then, is perhaps a really simple website, giving people a way of sharing these PDFs.

Clearly, it would take a while (and many contributed photocopies) before this became a really useful resource, and its unclear that there’d be sufficient enthusiasm early on. Below, I have some suggestions for an initial implementation, which it seems wouldn’t be much effort to get going.

So, a few days ago, Evgeny Smirnov, a graduate student who I previously knew from summer program I did in Utrecht 3 years ago, approached me during the one of the breaks and asked about the paper I had written with Milen Yakimov on Deodhar stratification in the double flag variety. Specifically, he was curious about how our work related to an old paper of Curtis’s related to ours.

I was a little surprised at this, since we had added an remark (on page 12 of the current version) specifically about this, at the request of an anonymous editor of Transformation Groups. Evgeny, on the other hand, was surprised to hear that this remark existed.

Greg Kuperberg has just finished working on the new Front for the mathematics arXiv. Except that it’s not just the mathematics arXiv anymore, it’s everything!

Otherwise, however, not much seems to have changed, and, to tell the truth, I liked the old look. Greg says that there are some new features still to be deployed, and I’m looking forward to seeing what these are. One thing I noticed is an OPML file describing RSS feeds for each category. Does anyone actually use RSS to read new arXiv posts? (I can see a good use for them anyway — I’m planning on using them to keep my little arXiv metadata project up to date.)

So, I accidentally submitted the aforementioned paper to the “General Topology” section of the arXiv rather than the “Geometric Topology” (I’m sure I’m not the first who’s made that mistake) and they fixed it! I got an email this morning saying that they had reclassified it. I’ve gotta say, I was impressed. Now we just have to work getting the arXiv to be a little more Web 2.0 (they really need to have a comments section).

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Secret Blogging Seminar

A group blog by 8 recent Berkeley mathematics Ph.D.'s. Commentary on our own research, other mathematics pursuits, and whatever else we feel like writing about on any given day. Sort of like a seminar, but with (even) more rude commentary from the audience.